Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Thesis - Restricted Access (SIA Only)

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Art Business

First Advisor

Judith Prowda

Second Advisor

Brendan Burns

Abstract

The leak of 11.5 million documents that dated between 1977 and 2015 and which were named as Panama Papers on April 2016 revealed the secretive dealing of over 200 million shell companies. In this leak, it was revealed that art has become a prominent asset class used to store value and which is also used to avoid taxes. In addition, the art the market is still faced by issues of forgeries and lose of documentation. For example, it is argued that it is difficult for an author of a given artwork to follow their work in art market and this results to the issues of copying or duplication of artworks. This has made the market to lose its credibility. For this reason, the art market needs to adopt the Blockchain technology that will heighten security, increase trust, expand clarity, streamline exchanges, track proprietorship and provenance and tokenize the artwork sales. For example, Monegraph as a blockchain technology allows the collectors, owners and art creators to verify and document the Provenance and authenticity of their digital artifacts. This is important since it helps them to secure the commercial value of their artworks. Artlery, Artory and Verisart are today trying to use Blockchain technology to create a public registry that will allow the verification of any kind of information of a given portfolio of an artwork. The block chain technology will therefore provide a more secure artwork transaction since information stored using this technology is locked and secure.

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